X has been really good about open sourcing all of the technical information from shut down projects. They did the same for the Makani power-generating kites. Love to see stuff like this
Citation needed. I worked there for two years and there are a LOT of projects that are sitting collecting dust that in my opinion could really help people if they were released as open source. The one I am thinking of (not my place to disclose what it is) was canned in 2017 and I always wished they would have just released it. X has open sourced some stuff and that is great, but whether they have been "really good" about this is debatable IMO.
Fair enough, maybe I should have said "X has done this several[1][2] times with shut down projects and I think that's pretty cool because they had no obligation to do so."
It's cool, but one gets kind of irritated when they talk this big talk about changing the world but do not seem to appreciate just how transformative open source can be as a tool for innovation. At least, I got frustrated.
What bothers me is that they really want to "change the world". Well in my mind, intentionally open sourcing something so that innovators all over the world can contribute can be a powerful force for improving upon an idea and lowering costs. When 3D printers were under patent the single company developing them got the cost down to $25k in 12 years. When the patents expired and people all over the world worked on it, the cost dropped to $250 in ten years.
X spends huge sums of money but never takes this approach of intentionally open sourcing a project during continued development in order to tap in to eager innovators all over the world who could contribute. And I think that is unfortunate because that approach can be extremely effective for lowering the cost of things and making them accessible to people all over the world. Personally I feel like they could do this with a few small projects as it is a very cheap development methodology. It would cost them basically nothing compared to their other projects. But then you can't profit from it (as much), so it doesn't fit in to what X is doing.
Which is weird, because X is a powerful development house. They could score a lot of goodwill if they did this on a few of the right projects. And it would have kept me there. But I couldn't find anything like that.
I fully agree, open source is incredibly underutilized. When it works well it can be extremely powerful. Take for instance the recent flipper zero kickstarter/product. It’s finally shopping and even though it’s very incomplete there’s already a vibrant community of hackers tinkering with it.
I feel the same disappointment as you. As a child I envisioned a world where I could go work at somewhere like Google and truly use their resources to give back but every project seems in some way tainted by the underlying drive to make everything profitable for the company funding it.
I don't know what standard we're holding companies to for projects they're shutting down. From my experience, projects that are closing down don't get as much support prioritization, especially when they're deemed unsuccessful.
I share your sentiment that we could get even more; it sounds like you're seeing even more interesting things the public is not. I am grateful for what they have provided so far.
Yes I'm aware of the Makani stuff. In fact according to a Makani team member I was probably the first person outside X to run their code when I generated some screenshots of their UI and posted the pictures to Imgur.
But Makani is one project, and again my only push back is whether they have been "really good" about releasing projects or whether there have been a relatively small number of notable releases.
My general feeling was that they are really almost 100% focused on profit and for the managers I met, I did not feel like they even understood the world-changing potential of open source. If your primary interest is in changing the world, you can get a LOT done with open source. Especially with the money they have. A relatively small project that releases a quality design and then continues to develop it while other people clone it in my mind has the best chance of gaining traction.
But that requires letting go of control. And I did not get the sense they were interested in that kind of thing. So I left and started my own open source project to explore this theory. In three years we have spent as much money as they would spend on a single mistake. I really wish they were more open to this kind of development, but I don't think they are really set up for it.
I am guessing either a) nobody pursued this for that project or b) the implementation had some cutting-edge/proprietary/secret-sauce (AI algos, models, data, etc) involved that came from some other part of Google.
I was very new and low level when that happened. But as I stayed there for a while I did inquire about some other things, and the responses I got showed me that they don’t really care. I tried to start an internal initiative for something and more or less got shot down. It was pretty upsetting actually.
So then I left and started an open source farming robot project I am really proud of:
Genuine question, when Google open sources these designs, are they actually open source/free, or are they like Tesla's "open source" patents, that if used, gives the company the ability to violate your patents and IP without the threat of litigation[1]?
Let's say that I'm not an engineer or a researcher or a coder, but would like to set some of these units up to collect water. How do I do so? Do I approach someone to build this for me (who?)? How much can I expect it to cost?
In other words, how can I actualize this vision:
> So the H2E team asked: “What if you could put the power to generate daily drinking water into the hands of individuals, no matter where they live, by creating an affordable, easy to use device that harvests water from the air and is powered by the sun?"
The prototype described is tricky. Basically because they want low unit cost, they had to assume mass manufacture techniques such as vacuum forming. This means that the cost of small builds will be quite high (since there's a lot of jigging and molds that have to be 3d printed/CNC'd). Unfortunately, they don't have a BOM cost listed anywhere I've been able to find.
But also because this is a prototype, and they wanted to be able to tinker and measure, there's lots of design features and parts that are quite expensive and not really needed. Assembly also appears to be tricky and time consuming with non-trivial risk of damaging parts that then need to be repaired.
So ultimately you have a design and plan that's neither directly suitable for mass-production or low volume production (which is fine! it's a prototype! it's super not done). The prototype as described would likely form an acceptable basis for further revision.
You could probably go to a mechanical engineering design/consulting/prototyping firm with this and ask them to make it real with minimal changes (removing extraneous measurement devices, maybe swap out some of the grommets). It'd probably cost you like 50k at least to get your first one. Second one probably will cost like 100 bucks range.
There is already a similar device on the market called a dehumidifier. It takes a fair amount of electricity and costs over $150. I think the core of the problem may be the amount of energy it takes to harvest water vapor, especially in arid conditions. (Likely the areas where the need is greatest.)
The TLDW version is these devices are fancy dehumidifiers. They need a ton of power, and lots of air humidity to be practical, which are exactly not the conditions these devices are advertised to operate in.
And even then, the water they produce is dirty, so it needs to be purified and treated to be actually drinkable.
Even if we solve all these challenges, it turns out that doing something dumb and low tech, like transporting drinking water on trucks is actually a lot more efficient.
This is another one in the long list of devices designed to help those hypothetical poor people, like OLPC and the Gravity Light.
It turns out these people have already solved these issues, and much better, usually with off-the-shelf alternatives and a bit of ingenuity.
I'm thinking wildly here and not getting into technicals, but it could also be seen not necessarily for humans but also for ecosystem restoration efforts in harsh remote environments.
For example, while I have some viability questions the company Terraformation has been trial'ing photovoltaic solar powered water desalinization (using brackish wells as a source) in deforested areas for water - https://www.terraformation.com/blog/solar-powered-desalinati...
Are there any sites that help build groups around current and upcoming open-source projects, and also encourage people to make stuff open-source - perhaps with pledges?
... a more business-focused GitHub.
... an OpenSea for inventors.
Imagine if money spent on NFTs would go to cool projects instead of avatars!
> Are there any sites that help build groups around current and upcoming open-source projects, and also encourage people to make stuff open-source - perhaps with pledges?
If a company can't think of anything useful and cost-effective to spend their money on, giving that money back in the way that passes through the largest portion of it is the most productive thing they could do.
Let the investors allocate their money efficiently, rather than buying a gold mine as a movie theatre company (as an example).
That's a pretty random example. Crypto? Maybe. But it's not like AMC is going to randomly get into the actual physical mining busin-- (hold on, it's 2022, lmgt just in case)
My guess is that if there were clear answers to those questions then the project might not have been shutdown. The hope is that someone or some other project might find a piece of this useful, or more optimistically that someone will find a way past any of the problems that made X take a pass on it.
Or if none of that happens, at the very least it serves as a free bit of knowledge telling others going down this path "it didn't work"
My question was more, how does this help individuals without access to clean water, not a dystopian 'how can it be co-opted by corporations for business ends', but I appreciate the varying definitions of "practical" people have.
> My question was more, how does this help individuals without access to clean water
If the principle of it is sound, which I cannot verify, then by a manufacturer picking up the idea. Developing it into a product and selling it to individuals.
They are basically saying (paraphrasing) "Hey we suck at manufacturing things at scale, so we won't continue with this idea. But we don't want to let our learnings go to waste. Go ahead and learn from our experiments and mistakes. Maybe one of you out there can make it work as a product."
What a totally disingenuous way to recieve the comment's spirit, which takes some serious miscontruing to take it to wherever you're trying to take it.
Such a lowbrow cheap joke to assume that open source means "come take all my stuff" vs "i've made this to share with everyone" which does a disservice to open source more than it is funny.
> dystopian 'how can it be co-opted by corporations for business ends'
Why is it "dystopian" and "co-opting" if a company uses a technology like this to operate in a more environmentally friendly way?
People love to shit on companies (not specific ones, just "big companies" as a concept in general), completely ignoring where our standard of living comes from.
Considering the project is self-described as a way to get drinking water into peoples hands, it certainly seems a bit dystopian to immediately jump to using this to collect water for DC’s… especially considering the original comment was asking “how do you build this”, not “what could you use this for”
I'd understand this more if the two uses would somehow conflict, e.g. by competing for a limited resource. But here? If anything, this is going to either preserve other water sources for others, or put more money behind the technology.
Yeah sure, but 1) prior to needing DCs, people need clean drinking water, and 2) the subset of people who need DCs is vastly smaller than those who need clean drinking water.
What exactly is a data center by your definition? What individuals (that are entirely disconnected from corporations) need them? How many individuals have personal data centers of such a scale that they would need to produce liquid water on-site for their computing needs?
I genuinely believe you’ve described an entirely theoretical person that doesn’t reside in this universe.
People need institutions to run functioning societies. These (public) institutions are one of the most traditional users of large-scale computing. Even in 60s there was a lot of computing done by public institutions. To fulfill the requirements of modern life, DCs are a must.
Most modern buildings have at least few racks of compute/storage for services like TV/phone/internet, camera recordings, etc. Even family houses have small racks nowadays.
This site is likely not hosted out of a person's closet, hence you commenting here is likely a product of a data centre.
Ignoring this specific example, a majority of the population uses social media for leisure and online tools for work (email, banking, etc.).
A majority of interconnects between ISPs and networks are hosted in data centres too... so there wouldn't be much of an internet without them.
If you closed all data centres over night, the majority of the above would disappear and certainly would not be able to scale as large as it had without data centres... hence, a majority of people need data centres to maintain their current standard of living.
The comment said "people", not "individuals" or "a person".
And considering how highly technical something like a modern water treatment plant can be, data centers are already a major force behind some of our potable water.
Considering they said allowing others to build on this progress I would imagine that they have not achieved their stated goal yet:
>The team aimed to build a highly lightweight, portable, cheap (<5% of user’s income) device that an individual could use to produce 5L of drinking water per day.
As far as I know every "water from air" is literally a dehumidifier and is going to produce dirty water at 1000x the cost of just driving water anywhere on earth.
A cursory glance of TFA suggests that it probably is another dehumidifier. Depending on the environment it might yield a small amount of water, but certainly not the kind you would want to be drinking without treatment. I look forward to thunderf00t's video on it.
> Our assessment—using Google Earth Engine13—introduces a hypothetical 1-metre-square device with a SY profle of 0.2 to 2.5 litres per kilowatthour (0.1 to 1.25 litres per kilowatt-hour for a 2-metre-square device) at 30% to 90% RH, respectively.
The upper bound is nice, the lower bound kinda hurts. I can't tell if they are tracking the night cycle and harvesting when the dewpoint drops. Is this all calculation or is there a blueprint I am missing.
This could be great for a prepper's toolbox. If it actually hits the $150 price point, it's easily affordable for someone in the developed world who just wants to be prepared if the developed world un-develops, and drinking water's a critical survival need that many properties won't have available without municipal utilities or transportation. And in most apocalypse scenarios that you'd prepare for, you can't count on transportation remaining available.
> The prototype described here is a purely experimental device. While substitutions and modifications are reasonably straightforward, water harvested with this experimental device is not intended to be ingested. Among other design choices, adhesives were selected for experimental performance and would need to be substitued with ones meeting food grade standards.
So typically Google. Patting themselves on the back for being smart and proving to themselves they could figure it out. But not actually accomplishing anything useful. Getting it to actually work - that’s too easy and boring for a googler to waste their time on.
But did they do anything new? Or did they just repeat a bunch of research others have already done into dehumidifying water extractors? I honestly don't know. A lot of the comments here make me think it's the latter.
Israel has made a massive desalination plant, to turn salt water into potable water and it's no easy task. If they could have taken water from the atmosphere I'm sure they would have tried.
They are not equivalent. Yes, it's disappointing; however, open sourcing it makes it easier for someone else to continue the relay race, rather than needlessly experience Groundhog Day.
The absolute worst case for open sourcing ("abandoning") a project is showing everyone else what you did and what results you reached or didn't, meaning everyone can avoid doing the same thing again, which is still a positive. All other scenarios are even better.
I want to make an orchard on a hill in the maritime pacific northwest. Its a somewhat odd climate where the time that gets hottest is when it also tends to be dryest (east coast tends to be wetter when hotter).
I wonder if something like this (possibly with less focus on "clean" water - it's rural and breezy, so I don' think raw output would harm trees...) could be suitable for generating summer water for tree irrigation.
Orchard on the coast is tricky. I don't know specifically where you're located, but on the Oregon coast the only fruit trees OSU says will grow are apple and cherry (and sometimes pear). I've had better luck going with native bushes where you don't need to worry as much about supplemental water: huckleberry, salal berry, salmonberry, blackberry if you can maintain them, etc. Work with the environment rather than try to force the environment to do what you want. :)
I'm hoping heavy woodchip mulching can get me enough water retention to keep trees happy (we certainly get plenty of water the other ~9 months of the year!), but some supplemental water during the hot dry summer would probably significantly expand species and variety options.
Have a small well that should be able to help some... but looking at permaculture techniques (hugelkulture, swales etc) and possibly moisture farming as a potential way to improve moisture conditions in a 'greener' way then energy intensive pumping. Might try to build a pond high up on the hill to filter down over the dry season.
Kind of a paradoxical region, because plants want lots of water when there's lots of sun, and here we generally get one or the other :-/
Pretty common here on the BC coast for people to plumb the gutters of their house and outbuildings to tanks and then use that stored water in the summer for the garden or topping off wells.
If you have 9 months of rain/live in a temperate rainforest it's not likely conjuring water out of the air is worth the effort :)
> Any water condensed from the air is going to be "pure" by most measures. It's essentially distilled water.
And you can freely give it for spherical cows to drink in vacuum.
Keeping any such device free from contamination is very difficult. Bacteria love the moist environments. Leave it unattended and you have moist dust. Lovely.
Fair point, I thought part of the energy was being used for purification before I read the overview pdf.
The site is ~ 1/4 mile from the ocean, so I think the air won't be totally dry... but just won't get a lot of rainfall. Mostly wondering if there's a good way to 'moisture farm' to keep the soil around trees moist. Ideally with no more power than a small solar panel located right next to the device, so I don't have to run power there (there's well and power at the bottom of the hill... but moisture farming would be cooler than running irrigation :-P).
No. The output is orders of magnitude too low. Trees stay cool by evaporating water. The solar energy they're absorbing by doing this is a lower bound on the energy you have to put in to condense that same water out of the air. But tree leaves convert about 75% of the sunlight that hits them into heat (they're a bit more than 75% "efficient" at doing something they don't want) while PV solar panels are only about 21% efficient. So you'd need more than three times as much solar-panel area as tree leaf area for that to work out.
As a correction, the paper is about a solar-thermal-driven sorbent system, not a PV-driven system. So you wouldn't need three times as much solar-collector area as tree leaf area, only about equal amounts. That's still probably orders of magnitude too expensive.
What is the intersection of people who a) can afford an expenditure of $150, b) have reliable access to electricity and can pay for it, and c) can't get their hands on five liters of clean water a day?
Many people don't have good access to clean water, over 2B according to the repo's readme.
Those people probably cannot afford $150, but the goal of the project wasn't $150, it was lower.
The unit is supposed to be solar powered, so access to electricity isn't strictly necessary, in the sense of being able to connect to the grid. They just need sunlight.
There is a sweet spot of cost, where those who need it can't afford it, but nonprofits, billionaire philanthropists, and local governments can afford to purchase and distribute such devices where necessary. In cases where the need for clean water greatly outweighs the supply, such entities see a good return on investment, simply by improving the health of those people there.
Furthermore, X is a moonshot program at Google. They attempt solutions for big problems with high likeihood of failure. Are you suggesting they shouldn't do this with their money printing ad machine? It seems like any good that comes out of that company should be celebrated, and in this case they are sharing a bunch of work on solving what will be an increasing large problem for the entire world.
I don’t see how it can be that billions of people lack clean water. It must be plentiful enough and clean enough for the billions of people to exist. If it wasn’t they wouldn’t.
First, let me say the number comes from the readme presented, not my own research or claims.
Second, the claim that the water isn't clean enough for drinking should be qualified. You can drink it and survive, hopefully. But bacteria exist in these water sources that give people dysentery or other illnesses from which they die. In underdeveloped parts of the world there are poor mortality rates. Humanitarian goals seek to improve those mortality rates, and providing clean(er) water is one way to do that.
Don't take my word for it though. Factfulness is a great book by Hans Rosling that discusses how the poorest people in the world live and some efforts to improve those lives, even if that's not the main focus of the book (it was the main focus of Rosling's career, iirc).
I think I see what you are saying, and I haven't read the book or anything on this topic. I can absolutely imagine how people would have better lives with more and cleaner water. But billions of people is an extraordinary equilibrium population already, and it makes me wonder if access to water will improve the lives in question, or raise the equilibrium population to a higher level at the same amount of misery and suffering.
At a high level, considering the population growth rates of developed nations, almost all of them are in decline. One could posit that at some point of improvement in life for a given population, the growth rate will plateu and then begin to fall, rather than increase in perpetuity. Looking closer at the developed nations that still have increasing population growth reveals a significant portion of it coming from immigration.
I've read a lot of stuff that says we should panic because population growth is bad, the world has too many people, it's already at or exceeding its carrying capacity, there's no way the whole world can live at Western levels, people in the West are super greedy and borderline evil for living like kings while everybody else starves. You and I need to get a lot poorer to free up resources for Asians and Africans to get out of extreme poverty, and if we object to becoming a whole lot poorer for the benefit of strangers halfway around the world, we're terrible evil racists.
I've also read a lot of stuff that says we should panic because populations are shrinking and aging. Economic growth is fueled by population growth, Social Security in the US and really the whole world's economic system is a Ponzi scheme based on an exponentially increasing population, we're headed for a ton of turmoil and collapse. If America wants to avoid a complete economic collapse, or having to replace its population with a super high immigration level that really ignites political tensions (think Trump presidency but 10 times worse), everyone needs to start having tons of babies like right now.
Is it really the case that positive growth and negative growth are both catastrophes? How does it even make logical sense that there are too many and too few people at the same time? Or is somebody lying? If so, who, and how can we tell?
> Data and geospatial tools around access to safe drinking water are provided here to aid academic reproducibility and advancement in the context of the Nature Paper “Global Potential of Harvesting Drinking Water from Air using Solar Energy”.
Again from the readme.
You're correct that the slide deck mentions a $150 price point. The readme mentions cheap as less than 5% of total income. If we assume the poorest people in the world, who walk miles each day to access water, then we are talking about income levels of ~$365-$730 a year. 5% of that is less than $150.
All of my points still stand. Project X at Google set out to solve one of the very hard problems in the world, and made their findings and work available to the public for free. It's clearly not supposed to be something going to market, so asking who will buy it that needs fresh water is obtuse, IMO.
You're thinking of vaporators. Binary loadlifters are heavy-lifting droids, though the binary programming language of those droids was quite similar to that of moisture vaporators. Maybe that's what you meant.
Go buy a 40 pint per day dehumidifier and then start sizing the solar power you will need to run it all day, and then make sure there is enough humidity in the air to actually get 40pints/day and make sure there is enough battery to make up for the days that aren’t sunny, and realize the people who need water generally don’t have that much water in the air, and then realize this is a pipe dream.
Are there any consumer-grade atmospheric solar water generators on the market right now? I did a very quick search and didn't find anything. Is there anything like this that people can buy right now?
Edit: There's also this water bottle I remember seeing a while back on Kickstarter or Indigogo. It doesn't seem like they actually sell it on the website: https://fontus.at/
It says clean, but isn't it only as clean as the surrounding air? For example if you used this next to a manufacturing plant spewing chemicals into the air, won't these contaminants be captured by the condensation and make it into the water?
You could buy a few solar panels, an inverter, a dehumidifier, and a water filter and be fine. The problem is sizing the power generation and dehumidifier to match and generate an amount of water meaningful to you.
Regardless you need quite a bit of solar to get a decent amount of water.
Given that a dehumidifier is prime bacteria habitat, I'd recommend probably also putting it through UV sterilisation (or ozone or chlorine) before a decent filter cartridge before drinking. But yeah, the energy required is so high that it's usually one of the least useful ways of getting water in most places.
At first pass, I would guess that something like this would primarily be useful in places with naturally high humidity, which aren't likely to have a shortage of water in the first place, no?
Maybe the argument is that the natural sources of water are dirty, and extracting from the air is automatically clean and safe to drink, but it still seems like it may be more resource efficient to invest in water treatment, not a fleet of dehumidifiers.
> and extracting from the air is automatically clean and safe to drink
It isn't, though. Bacteria accumulate. Dehumidifiers are generally very nasty. Although bacteria can then be killed (not sure about their toxins), while other contaminants may not be very easy to get rid of.
Almost every place on Earth has humidity above 0%. Which makes it possible to extract water, even if it's very inefficient. People have condensed water successfully in deserts.
Bacteriostatic materials aren't rocket science. One of the best dehumidifier materials, copper, is also one of the best bacteriostats. It's just expensive.
It might have some use in coastal areas where salt water can contaminate wells sometimes. But you are right it might just be worth pursuing something like desalination powered by solar power in those situations.
"Atmospheric water generators" (or: dehumidifiers) aren't new, the problem is that other means of obtaining water are almost always the better option (this includes access to funds, knowledge or materials). The places where this device would be helpful would only be helped if a bunch of them materialised out of thin air and would work with no maintenance or repairs, forever.
I've heard some of the members of the project will get a payout for deciding to end the project (kind of an incentive to not keep failing projects going), and employees get a length of time to find a new home within Google / X. Though it's the same as any transfer process: you have to apply for available roles within the company, do fit chats, maybe do interviews, etc.
Can the desiccant work in perpetuity? Or is it more of a "wear part" that needs replacement? I don't understand enough of the desiccant types mentioned in the Nature paper to know.
If they’re giving it away for free, that must mean there is a fatal flaw they could never design around and are confident nobody else will either. What’s the point then?
Allow me to snip a few quotes: "After three years of work, the team felt confident they could build a device that would produce water for $.10 per liter; however, it would have taken significant development work and iteration to prove feasibility at $.01 per liter. Additionally, the next phase of work for the project looked to be heavily focused on hardware integration and mass production expertise — not X’s sweet spot."
And:
"Given these factors, it became clear that X wasn’t best suited to take the work forward, and one of the best ways X could have an impact now on the problem of access to safe drinking water was to share what we’ve learned."
I have no idea what the prior state of the art of modelling viable areas for harvesting was (I presume this is probably where X made the largest contribution). As the blogpost identifies... X is not really the best group to tinker with large scale, low cost manufacturing prototyping and scale up.
this is just standard boilerplate at X which really means "the team and/or the executive sponsoring the project got bored and/or realized things required more professional work, and/or the idea wasn't really that great in the first place and the exterior world realized that"
They likely had trouble making it cheap and durable enough for the target market. Looking at the design files, the unit is quite fragile, thanks to the cheap vacuum formed plastic.
What needs to be done is using some of the GIS tools they released to find good locations for air->water setups, is figure out what materials and manufacturing techniques are available in those locations. This way you are more likely to design something that makes a difference. Anything built with materials or techniques that are not local will break, and they will be unable to repair because they do not have access to either the materials or the tools needed to do repairs.
I read their "Patent Non-Assertion Pledge", it's hard to interpret - they seem to retain lots of rights, as far as I can tell, it's not really 'giving it away for free'. Anyone wanting to develop this as a commercial product would probably have to call a lawyer first.
They won't sue you for using the findings or design, but they still have U.S. Patent on it and our pledging that Google will not sue those who use this intellectual property nor will anyone they transfer the patent to be able to sue.
What they call "infringement" just means that since they hold a patent others "copying" it would technically be infringing the patent - but they pledge not to sue.
This. They did excellent internal work, decided it's not for them, but did something good and want to share it. Just because it's not profitable for them doesn't mean it was a waste - they can use their new knowledge in other areas.
Que? Isn't "don’t see how it’s a market fit" just startup speak for "it's not economically viable"? That would fall squarely into the category of design failures I was talking about. It's not like we don't know any mechanism to cause condensation from air.
It's not economically viable with their usual profit margin, on a market large enough to pay for their fixed costs, with the suppliers and labor they have around, and a lot of other constraints.
That doesn't mean it's useless for everybody. So they publishing it may improve somebody's life.
Lowering cost by manufacturing at scale is knowledge they don't have, and they do need to make it financially viable. Other people might have it and make it viable.
It just looks like a proof of concept. They tested it in very controlled conditions. Did not see how it withstands being knocked over, dropped, covered in dust from storms. Their market is Africa. How many of the towns have road access? Will the product be damaged in transport on very rough roads? Can they be stacked in transport, and how many high (or will they be crushed)? Will adhesives fail after n temperature cycles in the blazing sun + nighttime cold? Can it be repaired by people living there?
Almost every part looks to be made from scratch. The only thing off the shelf is the pink insulation foam. Can any of this be sourced in the target markets?
There may be multiple reasons for this, some of which may be those you stated, but couldn't altruism be at least an important part of the reason they shared this?
Possibly they've already derived all the PR value from it they can, and further development of it wouldn't be a good ROI for them. Cynical take, to be sure, but also the most realistic one.
$150 cost and free cad files? for the needed? What a joke.
It reminds me of the Americans spending thousands to develop a pen for Nasa in space.
Some people took a pencil to space.
Here is a project from 2015 already invented without the need of cad files and uses only local materials: https://www.warkawater.org/
Pencils are dangerous in space—they can cause fires. Also, the “space pens” were not developed with taxpayer money but instead by a private company, and they actually saved NASA a lot as they bought them for dollars instead of hundreds or thousands as they did with pencils.
Son: "Dad, I'm thirsty, when can I have another sip of water?"
Father: "Have patience my son, there's only 4 more ads until the next ounce will be generated, and we can usually skip one of them after a few seconds"
I know, it's a cheap shot since X could have just mothballed the research and wrapped it up in patents.
The biggest question is why did they can the project?
Without knowing that, I don't really want to touch it. If I spent a couple of years trying to take their prototype design and bring it to market, only to discover the fundamental flaw that also caused them to can the project, it would be massive waste of my time and resources.
The Slingshot. Purifies via vapor distillation. Last I heard Dean Kamen made an agreement with Coke where they would help Coke build a water soda fountain in return for Cokes distribution network. Not sure what has happened since.
Hope it still works out, but I feel another sad Segway story coming up.
Not to disparage the open sourcing of this tech, it clearly contributes some knowledge to humaninity. But…
Has Google Moonshot produced _anything_ that’s commercially a big success? Seems to me that giving Astro Teller and a bunch of smart people blank cheques helps them have tones of fun without the pressure of actually succeeding?
A lot of people bringing up the thunderfoot video without realizing that this is... a completely different device. This is not solar-electric for one, it's direct solar heat. There's no peltier elements or anything like that, it uses ground temperature to provide the cold side of the dehumidifier. It does have a small electric motor and circulating fan, but that does not require very much power at all.
It's a largely passive device and not really comparable to the solar electric designs.
Check out Thunderf00t's videos cricising solar water collectors, e.g.:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7WqVMCABg - Zero Mass Water: BUSTED! "Honestly, it drives me crazy how many people have reinvented the dehumidifier, put a solar panel on it, and the media has danced around like theyve just saved the world!"
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvXnmBIO7o - Self-filling water bottle: BUSTED! "The fact that its thermodynamically impossible seem to stop 'science communicators' from promoting this. The fact that its a really dumb, and not particularly inventive idea didnt stop the 'science communicators' from promoting this. Kinda depressing really."
Problems include:
- it's much cheaper to bring in a tanker of water from somewhere else, than for the electricity to do this.
- It's a dehumidifier; in places where the air is wet, it rains, and you don't need it. In places where you need it, you need it because there's not much water, so it doesn't work well.
- It's going to be prone to growing bacteria; warm and moist.
- It needs a vast volume of air; when water becomes steam it expands 1000x. Which means to go the other way you need at least 1000 litres of steam dragged through for a litre of water. Air can be around 4% water says Britannica.com, so 20,000 litres of humid air for a litre of water if it's perfectly efficient. Thunderf00t's estimate is 50,000 litres of air for 1 litre of water; And the air needs to be cooled. That needs big fans and lots of power (air is heavy to move).
No, that's not true; it's just less efficient because you have to handle more air and cool it to a lower temperature. Air in Earth's atmosphere always has significant humidity. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30716765 for some calculations.
It's reasonable to condense drinking/cooking water from air with solar energy in places that lack secure water. Not water for other purposes; you can't run a cooling tower, irrigate a field or an orchard, water a herd of cattle, or even grow a garden that way. But a household-sized dehumidifier powered by a household-sized solar panel can certainly make enough water to drink and cook rice.
On the other hand, if you live in semi-arid desert or any wetter biome, a cistern probably has a better cost-benefit ratio. Depending on your aquifer, a well may be better still.
But aren’t the “debunkings” rather cursory and dismissive?
Instead I think real engineering relies on tradeoffs, certain areas of a multidimensional space where an idea makes sense - and others where it doesn’t.
Watch them and find out? He explains why it takes so much energy to boil and condense water, calculates out and explains how many Joules to condense a litre of water, how long that would take for various solar panel sizes, compares the solar-water-collector against mains powered dehumidifiers, compares the solar collectors against using the same size panel as a rainwater catcher in different environments, compares it against the price and time to get 10,000 litres of water in a tanker and drive it a thousand kilometers, talks about the product's claimed size, isntallation cost or use cases and how they don't make sense.
I see his style is divisive, but I don't think they are cursory, at least the two I linked; he's clearly put hours of time into making them, it's not just him talking and laughing recorded in 20 minutes.
This doesn't use solar electric though. It (mainly) uses direct solar heat. It also doesn't use any kind of peltier cooling. It's a largely passive device with a few minor electric components that won't draw much power.
People using his "rather cursory and dismissive" debunking to debunk other very different technology is kind of annoying.
They claim that this device with 1m² footprint could "well within thermodynamic limits" alleviate thirst for a billion people living in "tropical regions" (daytime relative humidity 30%-90%).
I already look forward to the debunk. It all seems very high-level. My money is on that these regions where the device would be viable do not actually suffer of lack of access to drinking water to start with - not to the tune of a billion thirsty people at least.
How about: Google found a way to alleviate thirst for a billion people and then decided it wasn't worth bothering with, stopped it being a project, and dumped the plans on Github? Norman Borlaug[1] won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to food production which is said to have fed a billion people, so I guess these authors had better things to do at Google than save a billion thirsty people and do Nobel level work?
From the paper: "Our assessment introduces a hypothetical 1-metre-square device with a SY profile of 0.2 to 2.5 litres per kilowatt-hour".
From the Thunderf00t video, checks out with a Google: it takes about 2,200,000 Joules of energy to evaporate 1 litre of water at 100C into steam at 100C, and so at least that much to condense 1 Litre of water from steam. There's 3.6MJ in 1KWh which is enough for 1.5 Litres. So already in the first paragraph of the abstract their upper estimate of 2.5 litres per KWh seems to be beyond thermodynamic limits (I could be very wrong, I'm no scientist; am I wrong?).
I'm not claiming any expertise or more knowledge than watching two videos just now, but their paper describes more than just solar powered condensing, with absorbent gels and materials involved as well (but still, wouldn't those have to take the same amount of energy out of the air to condense the water?). Their paper also shows desalination as being >100x more water per KWh than getting water from air.
Trash:
"Elon Musk Invents UNDERGROUND Traffic Jam!" "Tesla Bot"
No debunking. Small mindedness, pessimistic rant. Just says Elon will fail but not clear how he knows he will fail
Sure, some videos are more of a rant and he can come across abrasive but I think the fundamental arguments are valid. Hyperloop isn't a viable concept ever since it's been conceived over a century ago. And the tunnel projects have so far been underwhelming and universally panned as worse than a standard lightrail or subway.
The only thing that's relatively unknown is the "Tesla Bot" but considering that self-driving AI is still unsolved, let alone any kind of general intelligence, I don't think there's much behind that either.
He actually has outlined exactly what's wrong with these ideas. I mean the hyperloop was supposed to be "like an air hockey table", well guess what, musk now "advocates for wheels"... It's just a really bad and unworkable idea. The idea of 1000km long vacuum tubes is beyond stupid, when we already have high speed rail.
Please tell me how stating these facts are "small minded" or "pessimistic".
His main point is usually about the massive unwarranted hype and blind hero worship around these concepts, and usually scams (the water stuff and other kickstarter projects).
Dehumidifiers aren't what's thermodynamically impossible, of course; Fontus was just making quantitative performance claims that were thermodynamically impossible about how small their system would be and how little energy it would use.
You can see from that chart that at, for example, 20 degrees and 30% relative humidity (which, if you're not aware, is pretty dry), you have about 5 mg of water per gram of air, or about 5 grams of water per kg of air, which is about 0.8 cubic meters (1.2 g/liter). So if you want to produce 10 liters of water per day for your family, you need to run 2,000 cubic meters of air through your dehumidifier. (Or a bit more because you can't reduce it to 0% humidity.)
That might sound like a lot, but it's per day, so it works out to 49 cfm, which is not "big fans and lots of power". If we're talking about a 300 mm square aperture it's 260 mm/s of airflow, a breeze you can barely feel, which requires a totally insignificant amount of power compared to the actual refrigeration involved. This is not going to fit nicely on your bicycle like in the fraudulent Fontus videos but it is entirely reasonable as a household appliance.
Solar electricity is free if you aren't using it for something else.
As for bacterial growth and filtering, yeah, that's a real design constraint, and it's one that HVAC systems have fallen down on in the past with disastrous results, but it's not some kind of unsolved engineering problem. Every air conditioner, sea voyage, and water tower deals with it. Here in Argentina just about every house has a rooftop drinking-water tank, where we control bacterial growth with chlorination, by impregnating the tank plastic with bacteriostatic agents, and by making the tanks opaque so algae can't grow. Thousands of years ago, mariners dealt with it by dropping a silver coin in each amphora of drinking water.
It would be a more difficult problem if a dehumidifier were warm and moist, but actually it's cold and moist.
As for the relative costs of tankers and electricity, well, that varies depending on where you are. Around here supply chains are so unreliable that I'd hate to rely on a weekly delivery from a water tanker in order to not die of thirst in 48 hours. (Fortunately, I live a few kilometers from the biggest river in the world. Water is not a problem here, though in places pollution is.)
You also need power to take the heat away that is created when the water in the air turns into a liquid. Best case you need to cool for about 0.7kwh per litre of water you make.
That means for your 10 litre example you need best case 7kwh. That is a decent sized solar array and if you have any inefficiencies in your heat pump setup it gets much worse. Also you assume per day - solar only works during the day so you need storage as well so your system can work during the night.
It's worth noting that the Nature paper abstract https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03900-w.pdf claims they're spending as little as 0.4kWh/ℓ, which is less than the 0.68kWh/ℓ of the enthalpy of vaporization, though more than the 0.34kWh/ℓ of the enthalpy of vaporization divided by the CoP of a commonplace vapor-compression heat pump. (They point out that "solar-driven cooler–condenser devices suffer from a steep loss in electric energy conversion", by which I think they mean photovoltaic panels are only about 21% efficient, so you lose 79% of your sunlight before it can start driving your compressor.) They're using a sorbent-based cycle rather than a vapor-compression cycle. I should have read this before commenting.
They cite a paper by Kim et al. that calculates the thermodynamic limits on the specific yield of atmospheric water harvesting as 5–50 ℓ/kWh (0.02–0.2 kWh/ℓ), which I suppose depends on the air temperature and humidity.
Yes, that's why I said moving the air takes "a totally insignificant amount of power compared to the actual refrigeration involved." You're talking about the actual refrigeration.
The terminology you need to google for "the heat that is created when the water in the air turns into a liquid" is "enthalpy of vaporization of water"; around room temperature this is about 2.4 MJ/kg, so 10 liters/day is 24 MJ/day, which is 6.8 kWh/day, or, in SI units, 280 watts. However, remember that a heat engine operating at the Carnot limit is reversible. The coefficient of performance of a typical heat pump at these temperatures, the kind you might buy off the shelf at a big-box hardware store, is about 2, so you only need about 12 MJ/day (3.4 kWh/day, 140 watts). At a typical desert capacity factor of 25% this means you need a 560-watt solar array, about US$120 and three square meters. (California's utility-scale PV average capacity factor was 29% last I looked.) Very cloudy and polar places can have PV capacity factors as low as 10%, but they also have easier sources of drinking water. Like a rain barrel.
It's easier to store water or to "store coldness" than to store electricity, so you don't need electrical storage, you just need a heat pump sized for your peak throughput instead of your average throughput. Heat pumps are pretty expensive, so you might think this is a big problem, but the cheapest air conditioners I can find for sale around here are about 2000 watts, not 500 watts.
I've been noodling on desiccant-powered heat pumps for this and other uses, which may be able to reduce the cost of such systems, gather a larger fraction of solar energy than the 21% of high-efficiency PV panels, and provide built-in energy storage.
You say, whiloe going through the same calculations as Thunderf00t makes, to make the same points he makes. Including: how it is possible to do it, how dehumidifiers exist, what humidity means, how far out the Fontus design sizes were from being practically workable. 49cfm assuming you get solar power 24/7. Double or triple that to get it through while the sun is shining. I happened to see this[2] video of someone who put solar water generators on his house and reviewed it after a year. Check out from time 2:06 we can hear the fans running and see how "barely noticable" they are. (Insignificant power compared to refrigeration, I agree with). Said review video also includes a complaint about the water being unpleasantly warm to drink, because the whole system is on the roof of their house in the sun and the pipes all get warm.
> "Around here supply chains are so unreliable that I'd hate to rely on a weekly delivery from a water tanker in order to not die of thirst in 48 hours."
This comment is weird because I imagine you don't actually right now have a solar-water-dehumidifier providing water for your family so that you don't die in 48 hours when your water supply fails? If not, why not?
> You say, while going through the same calculations as Thunderf00t makes, to make the same points he makes
Right, but people reading my comment don't have to sit through a long video of some guy yelling at them to see that the calculations are correct. And they can see your correction to the airflow calculation immediately below my comment:
> Double or triple that to get it through while the sun is shining.
I'd say quadruple, given the typical 25% capacity factor for utility-scale PV in the desert in the US. (Quintuple or more if you aren't in the desert — but then you can just use a rain barrel.) I should have included that correction in my comment, and I appreciate that you took the time to point it out.
> we can hear the fans running and see how "barely noticeable" they are
It's all a matter of ducting cross-sectional area. 10k m³ per day is 120 ℓ/s; through a 100-mm-diameter round duct that's 15 meters per second, or 55 km/h, "near gale" on the Beaufort scale. The same 120 ℓ/s through a one-square-meter aperture is 120 mm/s, a wind speed where smoke from a chimney rises vertically.
> This comment is weird because I imagine you don't actually right now have a solar-water-dehumidifier providing water for your family so that you don't die in 48 hours when your water supply fails? If not, why not?
I don't live in the sort of desert where a solar dehumidifier would be a better option than a cistern; I live next to the widest river in the world. If I dig a hole in the sandy soil, after about three meters I have to stop digging unless I have an electric water pump running 24/7 to keep the hole from filling up with water. I don't know how things are where you're from, but here in Argentina, we have municipal water supplies run through pipes, supplied by water treatment plants. Unlike truckers, the pipes don't go on strike, call in sick, or get hijacked by asphalt pirates, and if a worker at the plant does, another worker can fill in for them. There's a 1000-liter water tank on the roof which takes about three days to empty when the water main does cut out. (Yes, sometimes that means it gets unpleasantly warm.) Dozens of grocery stores are a short walk away, replete with bottled water and soft drinks. We get 1200 mm of rain a year. In fact, it's raining right now.
A friend of mine lives in a nearby suburb that doesn't have a municipal water supply and where the river water is too polluted to drink safely. Her roof drains into a rain barrel.
My family members who live in semi-arid deserts without municipal water systems drill wells. (One of them actually has a dug well, the kind you could fall into, predating the municipal water supply.) The aquifers reached by the wells go lower every year, and sometimes you have to go and drill them deeper. In such places, civilizations like that of the ancestral Puebloans have collapsed during centuries of drought. People living in such places today without well-drilling equipment often spend many hours a week walking to water sources and carrying the water back home.
Many deserts today have no permanent inhabitants because of such considerations — you can only stay there until you run out of the water you brought with you. Burning Man is held in such a place, but not the driest one; there are places in the Atacama where rainfall has never been recorded. Theoretically a permanent settlement in such a place could rely on weekly water tankers driving in from wetter regions, but, for the reasons I outline above, only theoretically. Household-scale solar dehumidifiers are a much more feasible solution.
The more important reason my comment is weird is that it engages in factual and logical exploration of things that currently do not exist, but could, based on objectively verifiable information about the world. Your comment is weird in the same way, and I appreciate that. Let's have more weird comments.
" It's a dehumidifier; in places where the air is wet, it rains, and you don't need it. In places where you need it, you need it because there's not much water, so it doesn't work well."
I wonder how well it would work as a stand in for a desalination solution. Where there's all the water you want but it has salt (or other contaminant) that makes it impossible to drink. Seems to me that a beach would be the perfect place for it. At $150 price point it's a very good alternative to high price machinery.
Desalination produces a lot more water-per-KWh-energy than unboiling water from the atmosphere. Elsewhere in this thread someone linked a paper which estimates up to 100 litres per KWh for desalination, vs ~1 litre per KWh for condensing.
Saving on machinery, or chemicals, might be important but $150 of materials for a device will buy you ~25,000 litres of water in bulk (in the USA).
I don't have views on the credibility of specific technologies but I've hoped that these could be viable in places like coastal California where fog provides quite a bit of air moisture but it never rains--do you not agree with that?
In coastal California, redwood trees have been doing this since the Jurassic.
In the conditions you describe, fog nets commonly yield 2–3 ℓ/m²/day of water (20–30 nm/second), though experimental projects have reached yields over 13 ℓ/m²/day (150 nm/s): https://www.oas.org/dsd/publications/unit/oea59e/ch12.htm
Fog nets are easier to make and easier to repair, and consequently enormously cheaper. This makes them practical not only for drinking water but even for irrigation. They are more tolerant of damage, though they do need yearly maintenance. But they don't work on days without dew, and in some places, that's nearly all days.
The linked nature paper points out that over a billion people without access to safe drinking water live in areas where their design would be high performance (tropical areas).
From the README, "This is no longer an active project at X" ==> (implies) ==> We don't care about it any more, so we're dumping it here. Do what you want :-)
The Sahara desert has a relative humidity of 25% (on average). Humidity tends to be much higher in deserts at night. Atacama can go to 0-2% _at noon in direct sunlight_, but as high as 50% at night.
The driest location on the planet is probably Antarctica. Yes, full of water, in the form of ice, but the air is dry.
Energy costs are the major limiter to desalination and the availability of water more broadly. One or two people can do that but if an entire civilization does it they'll clearcut their forests and make the air unbreatheable. Cooking fires are a major source of air pollution in many Indian cities.
I think these systems were always intended for small scale use for detached villages and whatnot? I don't see a way they would be able to provide for city even if you made hundreds of thousands.
If you want to support a civilization you better switch to something that can exploit the volume for increased efficiency, like an actual desalinization plant and a solar concentrator powerplant to run it.
So imagine if you could convince the open source community of the planet to optimise clean water consumption based on a cool prototype and then you mass produce hyper-efficient instances linked to a google account.
Saving the planet one artificial intelligence at a time.
i've looked into air to water machines before and one downside i've noticed is that the energy use is really really high. one device I looked at was like 1 KW per 1.5 gallons or so! definately not something to water your lawn. At that energy usage, I'd say these are more useful for survival situations where you're only producing enough water for people to drink and survive.
Other than that, I'm very excited about the propsects of air to water machines, I really really hope they become a lot more energy efficient.
Given this is supposed to make 5 litres per day and is targeted at people who do not have access to safe drinking water, 1 kwh (I assume you mean kwh not kw) for 5.7 or 6.8 litres (imperial and US gallons are different) seems acceptable.
Just dig a well.
Or grab some ocean water and filter it.
Then build a big pipe.
Problem could be solved worldwide in less than 10 years.
But then what?
You can build a simple desalinator (aka, a solar still) with a couple bins, some glass/plexiglass, and access to sunlight. Preferably in an enclosed system to better contain heat and prevent water vapor from escaping.
No filters to replace, and it will run for as long as you feed it water.
Where do you put the left over salt? At those levels it’s both toxic for animals and toxic for plants.
Even putting it back into the ocean isn’t simple. If you do it in one big batch, you would kill everything in that location for a while. If you do it slowly, that isn’t simple.
Make margaritas. Put some on your steak. Throw the rest back in the ocean if you want.
We're talking, maybe a couple pounds of salt per person per day. It's not an unmanageable amount.
You're not going to hurt the ocean by adding back a little salt - salt that you took out of it...
Yes, you will most likely affect cultures within the immediate vicinity of a salt dump site but they will regrow elsewhere. It's peanuts compared to the amount of dilution being caused all the time by normal freshwater runoff and ice cap melts.
A problem with his debunking at a fundamental level - when calculating how often the air temperature is lower than the ground temperature, he uses Canada and Wisconsin. I'm not sure those are representative of Africa?
I think the key message of all the debunkings is this: "it depends".
The device may work great in one condition but certainly not always like the vendors might tout.
Given the triple point chart for water, the solar power for that day, and your humidity and temperature, you can compute the max you'll condense from the atmosphere.
Right. So the "major" (in my mind) contribution here is exactly the work of "compute the max you'll condense from the atmosphere" over all relevant regions. In the linked nature article, the published work is modelling to help determine regions where atmospheric water generator is viable for different assumptions and thresholds.
Considerations of efficiency and power consumption are relevant... but not much else. Generally such devices are either too expensive, too maintenance heavy, or utterly inefficient.
I'm not qualified to comment on, but I have found it interesting that it heats up the air (hotter air = can hold more moisture), passes the air through some material that's supposed to retain moisture, then cools it down with radiators. It seems that it would be more efficient in cold weather but would not perform nearly as well in a desert (where you need it to perform well as the moisture content is low during the day).
So maybe Mr. Thunderfoot will be able to debunk this too. If he can refrain from reusing Theranos and Boring Co footage.
I think you need more than just a YouTube video to "debunk" the nature paper that they have published and that is linked in their github. They seem to acknowledge that while there are some limitations it still is a viable source of water for a lot of regions.
What is surprising is that thunderfoot didn't lose his habit of repeating himself over and over again. I'm counting 10 videos "debunking" the same idea of a bottle that extracts water from air (which is not what this project really is, it's not a based around a bottle)& he's been beating the same dead horses for 6 years now.
Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.
Edit: Actually it's just weird at this point,his recent videos and their titles are so bizarre. It's either cheering at failures or Facebook tier thumbnails
"Owning" Elon Musk. Yeah, I'll definitely stick with the Nature paper.
> What is surprising is that thunderfoot didn't lose his habit of repeating himself over and over again
Yeap.
> Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.
His videos are recursive.
You see, even videos having nothing to do with the subject at all, he will still find a way to include Hyperloop, Theranos and Boring Co. footage. Plus older videos. Like a house of mirrors.
I really wish it wasn't Google, the spyware company that open sourced this. But rather a different company without all the bad and toxic disgusting ethics that Google has.
The phrase "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" comes to mind. Just because some of the practices of this large company are bad, it doesn't mean everything to come from it is. Keep the good stuff, ditch the rest.
